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I cannot reproduce this memory leak. I assume you saw this leak on the host, right?

Please keep in mind that VBox does memory allocation on demand, that is, guest memory is assigned to the VM only if the guest is really accessing the memory. You will notice that the memory consumed by the VM will grow when the guest boots and it will grow further when you start some guest applications. It will grow until a certain limit which is defined by the amount of RAM you assigned to the guest and by the amount of RAM which is necessary to maintain that VM. So before you start this test make sure that the guest did really access each page of physical memory. You can do this by starting big applications. Keep an eye at the memory usage of the VM process. When it reached the maximum you start start your test.

I've tested this with a Linux guest on a Linux host and even copied several directories with 10000 ... 40000 files of zero length from the guest to the host -- the memory consumption by the VM process did not grow.

My fault I was unclear in my discription. The Memory Leak occures on the Guest side.

To be sure its not a cache thing I let it run till no memory was left on the guest side, which let the Kernel drop an oom-killer. It seems to me, that the kernel allocates more and more memory and my impression is, that its the guest addition. If I copy the files with a normal samba share to the guest I have no problem.

Later on today I will try to reproduce it with a recent linux distribution as guest and host and report back with the results tomorrow.

Actually I spotted a very small memory leak but this leak will only waste some bytes every time a new directory is read from the shared folders and therefore I doubt that this is the same problem you observed. Though I would appreciate if you could check this fix: Please apply the following patch manually to /usr/src/vboxsf-*/utils.c.